Jim Gossett is one of the best-known and most highly honored athletic trainers in the nation.

Gossett joined the Lions in the summer of 1979 and became the Head Athletic Trainer in 1984. He administers a staff of seven full-time assistants that work with all 31 Columbia teams and operates modern training facilities on the main campus and at Baker Athletics Complex.

He has worked with most of Columbia’s teams but has particularly been identified with football, soccer, fencing, rowing and wrestling. He has the head athletic trainer for football since 1984. Gossett has worked with several championship squads, including the men and women’s fencing team, which won four NCAA championships while he was covering them. He worked with men’s soccer and wrestling from 1979 to 1983, when they earned a combined eight Ivy League titles and made two trips to the Final Four.

As a well-known athletic trainer in the New York Metropolitan area, Gossett was selected recently to serve as a spokesperson for Gatorade, Inc., and the National Athletic Trainers Association. His role is to promote healthy practices to prevent heat-related illness during the hot weather months, and to serve as a resource, including on-air interviews, for CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox television affiliates in the New York area. The New York State Board of Regents reappointed Gossett to the State Committee for Athletic Trainers. His five-year appointment is to the State Board for Professions, which regulates athletic trainers in New York State.

On the national scene, Gossett was the head athletic trainer for the United States fencing team in the 1991 World University Games in Sheffield, England, and spent three seasons as a trainer of the U.S. National Lightweight Crew. He was the athletic trainer for rowing at the 1988 Olympic Sports Festival, and for track & field at the 1987 Festival and Pan American Games. He also spent four summers as an athletic trainer for the ABCD/Nike basketball camps.

Gossett has frequently been honored for his work. In 2004, he was presented the Dan Libera Service Award for outstanding contribution to the Board of Certification. He was he was honored by the National Athletic Trainers Association with the Most Outstanding Athletic Trainer Award in 2003, for which he was nominated and chosen by his peers, and received the All-American Football Foundation’s Outstanding Athletic Trainer Award.

Previously, he had been honored by the New York State Athletic Trainers Association with the Thomas J. Sheehan, Sr. Award, its highest honor, and by the Eastern Athletic Trainers Association (EATA) with the Joseph A. Blankowitsch Award. A former president of the EATA, he was further honored with the 1994 Cramer Award for outstanding service, presented by Cramer Products in conjunction with the EATA.

Gossett, a native of Indianapolis, attended Indiana State University, graduating in 1978. He joined the Columbia staff in August 1979, shortly after receiving his master’s degree from the University of Arizona.